


Snapshots

by Setcheti



Category: Renault Clio "30 Years in the Making" Commercial
Genre: Canon LGBTQ Character, F/F, Reminiscing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-19
Updated: 2020-12-19
Packaged: 2021-03-10 23:34:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28175484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Setcheti/pseuds/Setcheti
Summary: As he looks forward to a family holiday, a father reminisces on how long the road has been to bring his small family to this point...and how inaccurate snapshots in an album can be.
Relationships: Gemma (Renault)/Sieza (Renault)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 13
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Snapshots

**Author's Note:**

  * For [El Staplador (elstaplador)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/elstaplador/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, El Staplador! You said you'd enjoyed the glimpses (snapshots!) of the commercial's developing relationship and would love to see what happened in between or after, so here's my ever-so-slightly knocked into the future take on that. 
> 
> Merriest of seasons to you and yours, and a bright New Year to come!

The little red-haired girl blinked sleepily up at her grandfather as he tucked her into bed. "I can have a story, Papy?"

"Of course, my little Sasha," was the answer. He sat down on the edge of the bed. "What kind of story would you like?"

She considered it. "About a princess!"

He smiled. "I'll tell you one of the princess stories I used to tell your mother when she was little, then. Once upon a time..."

Sasha fell asleep while the princess and her prince were busy escaping from a witch. He re-tucked the blankets, then eased himself up slowly but with much creaking, doing his best not to disturb her. Not that he thought she would be disturbed, considering the long car trip she and her mothers had taken earlier—they preferred driving to taking the hypershuttle and he couldn't blame them—but he didn't want to take any chances. They had a big day planned tomorrow, and the six-year-old was going to need her sleep.

He checked the nightlight—Gemma's old nightlight, just like the blanket was Gemma's old blanket—and then pulled the door most of the way to behind him as he left Gemma's old room. Sasha looked so much like Gemma had when she was little, with her clouds of red hair and upturned button of a nose. It was amazing, really. You'd never know to look at their little family all together that Sasha wasn't Gemma's natural-born daughter.

Gemma and Sieza had already gone to bed themselves by the time he got back to the front room, and his wife was in the kitchen getting things ready for the lavish breakfast she planned to make the next morning. He settled into his chair and decided not to turn the telly back on. The family album was still out from earlier, and he tugged it into his lap. It was heavy, and as complete as a regular album could be—they'd never been exhaustive chroniclers, but his Marnie was good about catching the important snaps and dutifully pasting them in, although she didn't go in for some of the fancy tricks with paper and glue and tapes that some other ladies used. There was a yellowed picture of their own tiny, impossibly dated wedding, a scatter of photos of Marnie preggers and then later holding a tiny, tiny Gemma in her arms. There were pictures of Gemma playing, Gemma at Christmas, Gemma on the two occasions she'd gotten to see her grandparents and the few times her uncle had come around in the first few years of her life before he'd moved to Queensland.

What no snaps showed was the long, difficult wait to conceive, the sleepless nights when Gemma had colic, or the funeral of said grandparents after they'd died in a road accident. Snaps didn't show everything, they just showcased mostly unrelated high points—the mundane incidents and lower points were left to the imagination.

Or to your memory, if you happened to have been there. 

The scatter of snaps from Gemma's exchange trip to France when she was nine seemingly told the story of a sweet summer vacation, of a friendship grown between two little girls who had started out as strangers, and of a heartfelt goodbye at summer's end. They did not, could not, convey how much that friendship had meant to two shy, lonely little girls, or show what the doting French _maman_ on the other side of the camera had meant when she said the two had become _comme des sœurs_. The gaps between the school photos which came after did not display the pen-friend letters which had flown back and forth across the Channel, the handmade Christmas gifts and strange candies and overly-glittery birthday cards, the shared experience of school's difficulties and puberty's confusions.

The space between school and college was marked with a single photo. A single snap of two beautiful young women, arms around each other, smiling brightly for the camera. It was the only reminder they had of what he and Marnie usually referred to as The Road Trip. And it was creased, water-stained, damaged. A casual observer would have assumed this to be the result of the photo being dropped or crushed in a travel bag, but it hadn't been. That particular photo had come to them oh-so carefully tucked into an equally carefully folded letter. 

That terrible, terrible letter. They'd found it on Gemma's bed on the same day the post had brought it, after realizing that their daughter had taken off into the night, and he'd sat in the car's passenger seat with it clutched in his hand, photo and all—Marnie hadn't let him drive, not with the state he'd been in. He hadn't been able to let go of it. He'd shaken the letter at Gemma, there in the rain when they'd caught up with her as she was trying to catch the bus to somehow rush back to France, but that hadn't been what it would have looked like to a stranger.

Yes, trying to run back to Sieza right after getting the letter had been stupid. Yes, he'd been angry that Gemma had taken off without a word to anyone and frightened them so.

But he hadn't been angry at his daughter for that being her first instinct. She'd been just past her A-levels...and Sieza had been her first and only love. So he'd yelled at her for running away, stomped back to the car to be yelled at by Marnie, and then gone back to the bus shelter and pulled Gemma into his arms and just held her while she'd cried, the pounding rain soaking them both and washing the blue ink of that beautiful, terrible letter into a soft watercolor blur on disintegrating paper and soaking the snapshot of Gemma and Sieza until it rippled like a satin ribbon.

In truth, he hadn't even been mad at Sieza. She was just two months older than Gemma, and he didn't blame her for not being able to stand up to her brother and, by extension, their father, for not wanting to throw away everything else in her life on the basis of friendship that had blossomed brightly into something else during a single summer vacation. As he'd told Gemma, when heartbreak had given way to anger later, when she'd raged over Sieza not coming to her instead of staying in France. "So you expected her to give up on family, on college, on the future you'd helped her plan," he'd asked, "just because the two of you all at once realized your relationship was more than a friendship could contain?"

"I thought she loved me!"

"She does. She told you so. And you didn't answer my question."

"We could have made it work! I could have..."

"Taken care of her?" She'd looked away from his very direct gaze. "How, Gemma? How would you have gotten on? Of course we'd have let her stay here...but what after that? With bloody Brexit going through next year she wouldn't have been able to stay, she'd have been forced to go back. And then what, after that? Where would she have gone then?"

His daughter hadn't had an answer to that. 

A month later, she'd written back to Sieza. _I understand. We're still friends._

Sieza's response, three weeks later, had been painfully, stiltedly 'normal'. At first Gemma had been crushed, but she'd quickly decided that Sieza was afraid someone would see their letters. So, for all intents and purposes, the two of them were truly just 'still friends'.

A few years went by. Sieza went to college, attended parties, made new friends. The letters kept coming, no longer stilted but no longer so warm or frequent as they'd once been, either. The unspoken chill settled into Gemma, and stayed there. She finished her own courses, moved out into a cheap little flat shared with a roommate. She came home one holiday with a thick envelope stuffed with a fancier ivory-coloured envelope which contained an embossed, gilded, pastel-flowered card layered with tissue and ribbon and overly-curly letters, and she placed it on the table as though it were a bomb that was about to go off. "It's not personal," she said in a quiet tone that spoke of much forethought and rehearsal. "Her mother doesn't know, so of course she invited me. I'm one of Sieza's best friends, after all. And it would be too rude if I didn't go, after Maman Ismay has always been so kind to me."

He didn't like it, but Marnie agreed with Gemma and together they picked out a dress that was pretty but not too much and did not stand out, and off to Paris Gemma went. A photo came back of her in the just-pretty-enough dress, with flower petals clinging to her hair, looking happy for her friend as was expected.

There was no snap of Gemma posing with the bride, because photos can only be taken of things which have actually happened. There were no snaps of Gemma crying, because she had saved that for the train ride home.

A printed thank-you card came for Gemma almost exactly one month later, signed by the bride and groom, but there was no personal note. No letters came from Sieza to Gemma after that, although over the years that followed Ismay still sent Christmas and birthday cards with messages which were kind and friendly but did not mention her daughter at all.

The supply of photos for the album thinned out even more after that. They had a few from Gemma's college graduation, one of her then-new flat in Reading where she'd gone to take her first job as a social worker, one of herself wearing the sweater Marnie had sent her for Christmas that first year when she'd been on-call and hadn't been able to come home. The growing gaps in the album might have caused someone who hadn't been there to think the unrecorded years were just her getting on with her career and building her adult life and not bothering to take pictures, but that wouldn't exactly have been the truth. There were no photos of Gemma's girlfriend because she didn't have one, and very few snaps of her visiting home or anyplace else because she didn't often get to. Her caseload had started off brutal and only gotten worse from there, and she freely admitted that she spent most of her off hours either shopping, cleaning, or daubing away at a canvas—she'd picked up painting as a hobby in college. "The paints don't get mad if I have to work late," she'd teased over the phone once when he'd expressed some concern about her only hobby being a solitary one. "Or go off if I don't feel like paying attention to them--I've got stress at work in plenty, I don't need to pile on more at home."

He hadn't been able to disagree with that. Everyone knew how hard it was on the social workers these days, what with the economy at an all-time low and a second pandemic threatening to come spilling out of the East. His beautiful little girl was a tired-looking woman now, aged beyond her years by her job's long days and late nights and frequent lack of happy endings. There were days he and Marnie wished Gemma had taken a different job, felt like they were watching the work suck all of the life and joy out of their beautiful daughter...but they were proud of her all the same.

They'd just wished she hadn't been so lonely. Back in those days, they'd wished it a lot.

He snorted to himself, softly—it had been a while before they'd found out just how close that wish had been to being granted. Gemma hadn't told them, when she'd gotten an actual letter from Ismay that was all about what had been going on with the family, with Sieza. Sieza who had left her husband when he'd openly admitted he was cheating on her and always had been, who had thrown it in her face that his proposal had been more about business than love. Her brother hadn't kept her secret after all, as it turned out, and her father's reaction had been to see to it that she was 'settled down' so she wouldn't embarrass him.

Sieza had left that very night, with only what she could fit into the boot of her old Clio, and fled to her mother's flat. Ismay had been divorced from Sieza's father for years at that point, and had mostly stopped speaking to her son. And eventually, once the tears and anger had run their course, she'd suggested that Sieza might want to send a letter to Gemma. But before she'd done that, she'd sent a letter of her own to Gemma, making sure the renewed contact would be welcome.

And Gemma, tired of her painting and worn down by work and futility, had assured her that it would be. She had only expected to exchange a few letters, maybe help her old friend come to terms with the betrayal and move on...but she hadn't expected the renewed lines of communication to grow gradually warmer as the deep bond they'd developed at nine years old reestablished itself.

Gemma had kept the renewed relationship to herself for more than a year, afraid of what her parents' and even her coworkers' reactions would be. But finally there had come a letter and a photo of she and Sieza sitting on the floor in the tiny apartment, one of Gemma's paintings serving as their backdrop. "Guess who came to visit?" she'd written.

And after that, Gemma hadn't been lonely any more. Some might think, given the complete lack of snaps showing her with anyone else prior, that she'd spent all those years quietly pining for her best friend and one-summer love, throwing herself into work to forget the one and only person she'd ever wanted to make a life with. Those people wouldn't be exactly right...but they wouldn't be completely wrong, either. Many, many of Gemma's paintings, never seen by her parents, were of blurry Impressionist girls with sleek ribbons of black hair and riotous tresses of fiery red-gold playing in bright flowered fields and sunny Gallic villages. Love is a complicated emotion, and the heart does not easily give up on what it wants even if the mind attached to that heart knows wanting won't make it so.

But sometimes, a miracle occurs. 

Maybe on a rainy night, with a father comforting his daughter in spite of his anger.

Maybe at the end of a dreary day, with a lost love returning and not caring about the changes time has wrought on a once-young face.

Maybe on a too-early morning in a coldly official office, when a stern-faced judge signs the papers that say the perfect little red-haired toddler you've been visiting with for months can be your daughter, now and forever.

With a sigh for all of the blank but ready new-old pages just waiting to contain more photos of Sasha, he closed the album and put it back safe on its shelf. The problem with snapshots is that they don't tell the whole story—not even if you string them together. A few snaps of an exchange visit pasted into an album do not serve to convey the depth of the friendship that trip had built. A warped and faded snap of friends-turned-lovers on a summer road trip could not show the heartbreak that lingered far past summer's end. And a snap of two women with their beautiful little daughter enjoying a family Christmas could not come close to conveying the long, long road that family had traveled in order to reach that point together.


End file.
